Maintaining Consistency - Calm App

The key to being consistent is to have well-established routines.

I've been using the Calm app on Android for 6 months now. This app has a nice feature that tracks your meditation history and also tells you how long your streak is. Surprisingly, they don't advertise this feature on their site. 

Here's my meditation history for the first 3 months of this year. When I saw this yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to see how consistent I was - 

The story for the next 2 months however was quite different - 

A famous research study conducted by the University College London states that it takes 66 days to form a new habit. In my case, I definitely crossed that threshold but I still ended up breaking the well-formed habit. So what's the deal here?

Well, I had to travel for 10 days in April, and that effectively disrupted my routine. Once I got back, I found it harder to settle back into my rhythm. This experience taught me 2 valuable lessons - 

(1) It may take 66 days to form a habit, but it takes a lot less time to break the habit (and I'm talking about good habits here!). So I need to be on my guard esp when I'm doing something that disrupts my routines (like travelling).

(2) Routines are key to forming and retaining habits. When it comes to meditation, doing the practice at the same time and at the same place works best.